You don’t need religion to have morals.

 If you can’t determine right from wrong then you lack empathy, not religion.

Umarmung (Étreinte), 1946 by Heinz Hajek-Halke

We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.

Carl Sagan

William Garnett , Snow Geese with reflection of the Sun over Buena Vista Lake , California 1953

I tell you loneliness is the thing to master. 

Courage and fear, love, death are only parts of it and can easily be ruled afterwards. 

If I make myself master my own loneliness there will be peace or safety: 

and perhaps these are the same.

Martha Gellhorn 

12 Obnoxiously Awful Social Norms

12 Obnoxiously Awful Social Norms | Thought Catalog

We were taught a very bad philosophy, a way of looking at the world 

that contradicts who we are. We were taught to think thoughts like competition,

 struggle, sickness, finite resources, limitation, guilt, bad, death, scarcity, and loss. 

We were taught that things like grades, being good enough, money, 

and doing things the right way, are more important than love. 

We were taught that we’re separate from other people,

 that we have to compete to get a head, that we’re not quite good enough the way we are. We were taught to see the world the way that others had come to see it.

 Love is what we were born with. 

Fear is what we learned here. 

The spiritual journey is the relinquishment, or unlearning, 

of fear and the acceptance of love back into our hearts.

 Love is the essential existential fact. It is our ultimate reality and our purpose on earth. 

To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, 

is the meaning of life.

 From ‘A Return to Love’ ~ Marianne Williamson